Wednesday, December 19, 2012

The arguments of fragment 8, on this view, are then understood as showing that what can be thought and talked about is, surprisingly, without variation in time and space, that is, absolutely one and unchanging. Owen adapted an image from Wittgenstein in characterizing these arguments, ones which “can only show the vacuousness of temporal and spatial distinctions by a proof which employs them,” as “a ladder which must be thrown away when one has climbed it” 
Although they repeat the essentials of Owen's view, Kirk, Raven, and Schofield finally acknowledge that the presence of the elaborate cosmology remains problematic for this line of interpretation: “Why [the cosmology] was included in the poem remains a mystery: the goddess seeks to save the phenomena so far as is possible, but she knows and tells us that the project is impossible” (Kirk, Raven, and Schofield 1983, 262, after echoing Owen's line on the cosmology's dialectical character at 254–6). While the meta–principle interpretation raises the expectation, which fails to be met, that the principles of Parmenides' cosmology will conform to the requirements he has supposedly specified earlier in the poem, the strict monist and logical-dialectical interpretations leave even some of their own advocates wondering why Parmenides devoted the bulk of his poem to an account of things his own reasoning is supposed to have shown do not exist.
Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy
It seems to me to be a way for Parmenides to talk about the world that we actually live in, or believe we live in, while remembering that there is another whole level of existence.
Assuming that the universe has always existed and is a series of parallel universes and that our world is the world of beings and things that we see here and now. The quantum universe allows for entities to pop into existence from anywhere else. This assumes that the entities already existed before they popped into this universe and therefore did not have to be created in order to discover an existence here.


3.4 The Aspectual Interpretation Prevailing in Antiquity

The idea that Parmenides' arguments so problematized the phenomenon of change as to make developing an adequate theoretical account of it the central preoccupation of subsequent Presocratic natural philosophers is a commonplace of modern historical narratives. Unfortunately, this notion has no real ancient authority. Aristotle's account at Physics 1.8.191a23–33 of the wrong turn he claims earlier natural philosophers took in trying to understand the principles of change has often been thought to legitimate this view, given the Eleatic-sounding argument it records. But Aristotle mentions Parmenides nowhere in the passage, and his complaint is in fact broadly directed against all the early Greek philosophers whose views he has been surveying previously in the book. He complains that they naively adopted the view that no fundamental entity or substance comes to be or perishes, the result being that they are unable to account for, because they disavow, substantial change, which is the very phenomenon Aristotle is most interested in explaining. Aristotle actually understands Parmenides' thesis that what is is one (hen to on) and not subject to generation and change as belonging, not to natural philosophy, but to first philosophy or metaphysics (Cael. 3.1.298b14–24; cf.Metaph. 1.5.986b14–18, Ph. 1.2.184a25-b12).









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